Marriage and Money

After Peter and I announced our engagement, his uncle warned us that finances would be a major factor in whether our marriage lasted. He urged us to set goals for saving and plan for spending, but we pretty much blew him off. What did he know? He wasn't a financial planner. He was a Catholic priest.

But it turns out the man was right (about this and a number of other things).

Peter's a spender, and I'm a saver, so we've had to learn to work together (we're still learning). An article in the New York Times seconds his uncle's advice, although the bit it includes about running your marriage like a business sounds tooth-grindingly dull. I can't imagine that would result in a lot of passion and laughter.

However, a financial planner I've become friendly with reported he has one client who makes a 400K annually but is 100K in debt. From the outside, Mr. Four-Hundred-Thousand-Dollar-Bar probably looks like the picture of success, but being married to him would probably mean a lifetime of lying awake waiting for the repo man to come screeching up for the Bentley. Which probably wouldn't result in a lot of passion and laughter, either.